4/09/2007 @ 5:48PM

Apple's Speed Record

Apple
marked yet another milestone in the iPod’s five-and-a-half-year long march toward ubiquity when it announced Monday it had sold 100 million of the pocket-sized music players.

While Apple
won’t own up to how many of those 100 million are second or third iPods for gadget-loving owners (see “Apple Says Buy Another iPod”), the company insists the iPod is the fastest-selling music player in history. That doesn’t make it the best-selling music player in history, though. That honor goes to Sony‘s
Walkman product line, which has moved 350 million units since 1979.

But give Apple credit. It took Sony 13 and a half years to sell its first 100 million cassette playing units, and few other consumer electronics devices have passed the 100 million mark at all. There’s Sony’s PlayStation 2, which hit 100 million in five years and eight months, and the original PlayStation, which took 10 years. Nintendo‘s
portable Game Boy system got there in 11 years.

So will anyone else ever come close to moving as many gizmos as fast as Apple and Sony have been able to? Not likely. By the end of March 2007, Sony had sold between 4.5 million and 6 million of its new PlayStation 3′s worldwide. The company would have to sell 1.4 million units a month for the next 64 months to beat the record. And right now Sony is selling only about 150,000 units a month.

And outside of the videogame world, hardly any other brand-name devices seem set to reach the 100 million barrier. Even those devices that seem to be ubiquitous still have a long way to go. Research in Motion‘s
BlackBerry? A mere 7 million subscribers.

Motorola‘s
Razr phone, which seems to hang off ever ear across the country, has shipped to an impressive 60 million consumers, but it looks as if the product line’s best days have passed. And forget Microsoft‘s
Zune music player–the company’s only public sales forecast puts the device at 1 million units by the end of June 2007.